To suggest that there is such a thing as "childism" is to risk ridicule. The notion of children's rights is inevitably greeted with hostility in a political climate where young people are most often maligned for their lack of respect for the rights of others. But lately, as the government's authoritarian stance on childhood proves unworkable and, in some cases, fatal, while public opinion shifts significantly on the treatment of children within the home, there is a change in the mood music. Could children's rights finally be coming of age?

There has been a dramatic surge in parliamentary support for a smacking ban, with a record 170 MPs supporting Greg Pope MP's motion to grant children the same legal protection from assault as adults, reflecting the turnaround in public attitudes over the past generation.

Meanwhile, a number of prominent peers are supporting amendments to the Police and Justice bill, currently in the Lords, to reinstate reporting restrictions for children subject to Asbo proceedings and to end penal custody for children. The latter is given particular resonance following the findings of last week's inquiry into the murder of Zahid Mubarek, which stated categorically that we lock up too many children.

And the Children's Rights Alliance for England is campaigning for pupils to have the right to have their views considered in matters affecting the everyday running of their schools included in the Education bill, which would give English children entitlements that their Scottish peers have enjoyed since 2000.

So will we soon be witness to latter-day child Chartists marching for suffrage with Smarties? It's not difficult to make the case that children's rights are poorly served in the UK. Children can, by law, be assaulted by their parents if it meets the requirement of "reasonable chastisement". A young offender can be tried in an adult court and named and shamed in newspapers, in direct contravention of their internationally recognised human rights.

Although the government has committed itself to the elimination of child poverty, the numbers of children growing up without warm beds or hot meals remains unacceptable. And adults could be argued to be depriving children, and their children's children, of the right to a future, as they leave them with a planet on the brink of environmental collapse.

Meanwhile, across the globe, children are proving themselves to be thoroughly competent. Ten-year-olds head households in war-torn Africa. Child labourers unionise in India. Because children can doesn't always mean children should. But ordinary children in extraordinary circumstances are continually revealing capabilities that remain unexplored in their more fortunate peers. The possibilities offered by a rights-based approach need not deprive children of their childhoods nor dissolve into a reductio ad absurdum of votes for toddlers.

But it makes for a poor fit with New Labour's construction of child citizenship, which could be characterised as requiring social conformity in the present and employability in the future. Indeed, many adults think that children already have too many rights, perhaps because they confuse rights with pester-power. But acquiring designer clothes or state-of-the-art technology is not the same as having rights. Adults fear that "rights" means children refusing to go to bed at a reasonable hour, demanding extortionate pocket money, and divorcing their parents if they don't give them what they want.

This misunderstands how children's rights might operate in practice.

Children's citizenship is different from that of adults. Of course parents and the state are often best-placed to make decisions for children. But the fear that rights will create a generation of mini militants grabbing what they can from the diminishing pot of adult power, is based on a fundamental misconception about what growing up is really like. It suggests that childhood is a time free of challenge or difficulty, when rights are unnecessary and would only be used for petty personal gain.

It follows that children's rights cannot be exercised in isolation. Their rights to provision, protection and participation, laid out in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, must be balanced with adults' responsibility to facilitate them, and children's own responsibility to exercise those rights with consideration for others. Children's rights need not be an affront to adult authority.

Bertrand Russell said that "no political theory is adequate unless it is applicable to children as well as to men and women". But it is a far more paternalistic tradition that has prevailed in modern times. In some ways, it's akin to how women's and ethnic minorities' rights - or lack of them - were framed. Indeed, it's been argued that children are now in the position once occupied by the idealised bourgeois wife and mother, as historian Harry Hendrick puts it, "pampered and loved, an essential ornament serving as testimony to domestic bliss, but subservient to male power."

We are living in an era of child-panic, when concerns about children's wellbeing have become all-consuming. Childhood has become the crucible for every adult anxiety - sex, technology, consumerism, safety, achievement, respect, the proper shape of a life. Of course adults worry about children. Changes in how childhood is lived attack at the deepest level our sense of personal history and our ideas of what make us human. The work of raising children is love and life-enhancing, but also difficult, and poorly supported.

But if we are to reach a consensus on the kinds of morals, ambitions and characters we want our children to have, then we need to return to a notion of common citizenship. It's time to rebel against the modern absolute of individualism. Parenting cannot happen in isolation. As the saying goes, it takes a village. It takes a country. And it also takes a recognition that children themselves can play a part in their development.

Granting young people a more central role in society is not a panacea for the multitude of challenges that attend contemporary childhood. Children need limits to learn from, but that is not the same as limiting them purely by virtue of how old they are. Adult authority which is necessary should not be confused with adult power that is abused.

Nor should contemplation of children's rights - whether it involves the UN Convention, domestic legislation or a more intangible cultural change - be seen as an inevitable erosion of those of adults. If anything, offering power to a child augments the adult's role in teaching them how to use it humanely.

Children's rights are not a liberal luxury. They are real, and deserved. Children have the right not to be hit, to make mistakes and to learn from them. They have the right to be consulted about decisions that affect their future. Children's rights are respected in countless ordinary homes across the country. But where they are not, particularly in the case of children growing up on the margins, they must be fought for.

· Libby Brooks's The Story of Childhood is published by Bloomsbury this week; to order it for £8.99 with free UK p&p, go to theguardian.com/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875